


the time we hold (and the hearts it breaks)

by desperheaux



Series: it made them sour, my superpower [1]
Category: Dreamcatcher (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Angst, Blood and Violence, Everybody Dies, Everybody Loves, F/F, Saving the World, only time will tell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:54:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27243046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/desperheaux/pseuds/desperheaux
Summary: “Call me sometime? When you’re done saving the world, and everything,” Minji says, her smile small and heartbreakingly beautiful, and it kind of feels like the world is ending anyway when she leans up the slightest bit to kiss away the tear that trails down Yoohyeon’s cheek.Yoohyeon is seventeen when she chooses what is inevitable.
Relationships: Kim Bora | SuA/Lee Siyeon, Kim Minji | JiU/Kim Yoohyeon
Series: it made them sour, my superpower [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1989118
Comments: 22
Kudos: 59





	the time we hold (and the hearts it breaks)

**Author's Note:**

> I am not entirely sure what the rating of this should be, so do let me know if I should change it! Content Warning for blood, death, heartbreak, vaguely described supernatural powers, and a literal bout of stream of consciousness over the course of a few insomnia(c) nights.

Yoohyeon is seventeen when she technically gives up her heart, bits of extraterrestrial plasma embedding in her chest like shrapnel and forever altering the power of her pulse.

Yoohyeon is fifteen when she really gives up her heart, all staccato stuttering and racing rhythms at the feel of a smile against her own lips.

At fifteen, she falls in love with Minji. At seventeen, she becomes a superhero. She doesn’t have much of a decision in either of these, but they still make it feel like she chooses one to give up.

“You would be dead if we hadn’t saved you,” they say, “and now the world needs you to save it.”

Yoohyeon knows this is true, but it still feels sort of like dying when Minji gazes kindly at her, soft and warm and filled with a familiar fondness that makes even Yoohyeon’s new heart skip a beat.

“Call me sometime? When you’re done saving the world, and everything,” Minji says, her smile small and heartbreakingly beautiful, and it kind of feels like the world is ending anyway when she leans up the slightest bit to kiss away the tear that trails down Yoohyeon’s cheek.

Yoohyeon is seventeen when she chooses what is inevitable.

Yoohyeon is eighteen when she is placed in a team with others like her and sent out to fulfill her duty. Yoohyeon is nineteen when she forces herself not to regret. Yoohyeon is twenty when it finally gets easier to take lives in order to save others. Yoohyeon is twenty-one when she finds out that her twisted heart beats the same even as she lies bleeding out and unable to breathe through the pain. Yoohyeon is twenty-two when she saves the world yet again, when victory comes at a cost so steep this time they force the remainder of the team to disband and disappear.

Yoohyeon is twenty-two when she is done saving the world, but she is twenty-three when she finally calls.

Yoohyeon has made difficult decisions. It is how she has saved the world, many times over. She has faced down pain and death, has grappled with the dangerous limits of her power and the worst instances of powerlessness, has lost teammates and almost lost herself.

But six years later, she stands at one of the only remaining payphones in the city where it all started, dials a number she thought she had forgotten, and knows in her weary heart that this is the hardest thing she’s ever done.

_“Hello. ...Hello?”_

_“...Minji?”_

_“Yes, this is Minji. May I ask who’s speaking? ...Hello?”_

_“...I’m sorry, I just wanted to... return a call...”_

_“...Who is this?”_

_“...and everything.”_

_“I’m sorry, what was that?”_

_“I’m done saving the world, and everything.”_

_“...Yoohyeon?”_

_“So I hope... I hope you’re safe, and happy. Because that will have made all of this worth it. And I know it’s selfish to say this, but if I could go back and choose, I wouldn’t have left. Maybe they would have taken me anyway. But at least… at least you would have known I didn’t leave you willingly. That I wanted to stay and maybe the world wouldn’t have been safe but maybe we would have been happy anyway… because the world has tried to take my heart over and over but you are the only one who has ever held it. And it’s tired — it’s so tired now, after being used like this, and I have — the world has changed so much, but Minji — Minji, I hope you know that I never stopped — that I still...”_

_“...Yoohyeon? ...Yoohyeon??”_

Yoohyeon is fifteen when she gives up her heart. She is twenty-three when her heart gives up.

Minji is twenty-four when hers shatters.

The world is ageless, perpetual and unforgiving, when it gives birth to Jiu.

Gahyeon is twenty, the same age that Yoohyeon taught herself to forget in order to survive, when she watches her older sister become someone else. Jiu is deadly steel crafted from anguish, burning grief doused in cold rage. Jiu emerges from hissing clouds of pain with sharp, jagged edges. Jiu wants to take from the world what it took from her.

She will number the world’s everlasting years. There is no scabbard for a weapon forged in heartbreak.

“She was exactly how you left her,” Gahyeon whispers to a bare tombstone that robs Yoohyeon of even a record of her years spent in the world. “She was kind and selfless and strong. She took care of me, of everyone she met, with so much love — but it felt sad, aimless; like she was meant to share all that love with one person, and that person was here but still gone so she didn’t know what to do with a heart that was hers but still wasn’t.”

Gahyeon rises from the overgrown grass with muddy knees and a sigh too old for someone so young.

“For six years she was exactly how you left her, waiting, proud of you and growing on her own but still hoping. She never worried about you, you know. When you left and when the world was ending and when the heroes disappeared, she was never worried. She believed in you. That was what killed her, in the end, wasn’t it? Minji always believed wholeheartedly in people, in the goodness of the world. I think she had to, in order to let you go. But I don’t think she ever let go of you. She held on and believed and hoped with all her heart so when you left us again and they took even your body away and told her that you never existed, she couldn’t possibly be Minji anymore. They took away everything Minji believed in. So she became someone else.”

Yoohyeon’s grave is a small marker of marble in Gahyeon and Minji’s backyard. That is all they provided for consolation, for honour. An uncut stone smoothed over by droplets of rain and tears.

“Jiu is impatient and unforgiving and cruel. Jiu kills and destroys and takes and takes, but it isn’t ever enough. Jiu isn’t Minji, but I think, somehow, she’s still waiting for you to come back.”

Jiu hasn’t been home in months. Minji hasn’t been in a year. Gahyeon remembers being twelve years old and innocently asking when her second favourite person in the world would return. “She’ll come home soon,” her first favourite person had said quietly, and now Gahyeon wonders if maybe Minji really hasn’t felt at home since back then.

The tombstone remains silent. Off in the distance, a phone rings. Thunder begins to rumble. The rain hasn’t let up in the past few days, and it looks like this morning will be no different.

She turns to go back inside, and comes face to face with dark, haunted eyes.

“Gahyeon, sister of Jiu. I am sorry to tell you on this day, but we are out of time.”

Gahyeon is twenty-one when she meets Dami for the first time. They won’t meet again another day before the world ends, but neither of them know this yet.

She stares at the shadowy figure who just appeared in her backyard, and vaguely wonders why she isn’t more scared, or even very surprised at all. Dami extends a shaky hand out as the skies crack above them and begin to weep once more. As Gahyeon takes it and feels the tremors extend until they envelop both of their bodies, as she lets herself be transported far from her home before the first raindrops can touch her head, she realizes that maybe she too has been waiting all along.

Siyeon counts time in cycles of the moon, and even then only the worst ones, the ones she can’t remember. Sua doesn’t keep track at all, because everything burns eventually.

Yoohyeon used to insist there was a point to it. She would mark off days on a calendar in red ink and circle important dates in blue. Excited strokes for milestones like when Dami perfected her teleportation through any reflective surface, or whenever Seungyeon managed not to trip over something during group training. Careful, light lines for death anniversaries they’d all rather forget but couldn’t because no one else would remember for them. Dark and heavy circles over long series of days when missions stretched endlessly on and they saved as many as they damned.

Yoohyeon was the only one who remembered birthdays. Sua still feels remnants of incredulity when she recalls the time after a barely successful raid on a secret military base, when five of them were slumped battered and bruised in their rescue aircraft, and Yoohyeon had suddenly jolted and demanded a lighter. Sua had immediately snapped into high alert, finger ablaze and ready to cauterize another wound or to strike an invisible enemy. Yoohyeon had merely dug around the pockets of her camouflage fatigues until she produced a squashed muffin wrapped in tin foil and a slightly bent candle, directed Sua’s frozen finger to light the wick, and cajoled everyone into a bewildered rendition of the birthday song for an equally disbelieving Handong.

When Yoohyeon was captured for a month, when she remained unreachable even half a year after they finally managed to rescue her from that hell, Handong was the one who dutifully continued marking her calendar for her.

Sua hasn’t seen Handong or Yoohyeon since the government sent them off to different corners of the world and then shut down their program. Sua has once again forgotten when her own birthday is.

Yoohyeon used to say there was a point, an importance in remembering. She also used to whimper a single name around the screams of her nightmares. Whether these subconscious convictions ceased because she forgot or because she stopped sleeping long enough to dream, Sua doesn’t know — she only knows that everything burns eventually, and that lies just help to contain the flames.

“Dami dropped by through the lake. Says Yoohyeon’s gone. Came out of hiding to make a phone call, collapsed on the sidewalk. They took her body away.”

Siyeon doesn’t greet her when she ducks through the entryway of the cottage, even though she’s been gone for four nights. Sua doesn’t expect her to. They share this understanding, this connection that would be called trust by anyone else; sometimes Siyeon has to let the beast run wild and savage and far away from human life, and sometimes Sua has to set herself on fire and let the lake try to smother her.

They live in a remote forest equidistant from civilization and a wilderness that would be so easy to run into and never look back from. They sleep under a thatched-roof square of leaves inside four tinder-perfect walls. They can’t call it trust, but something pulls Siyeon back to a shared shelter that remains intact every time she runs and every time Sua burns.

Eventually they will burn and run for good, they know. It just hasn’t happened yet.

“Wasn’t her alien heart supposed to make her immortal, or something? Yoohyeon was damn near invincible. At least physically.” Sua remembers waking up in her bunk to a rhythmic, familiar sound of a fist colliding with a body. She slides silently out of bed, holds up a flame in her palm for light, and peers up at the top bunk to see Yoohyeon, half-asleep, pounding at her own chest as if to rid her body of the incessant beating. This memory could have been from long ago; it could have been from yesterday. It’s all the same. Except now Yoohyeon is gone, too.

Siyeon cards a hand devoid of claws through her hair. Even like this, with blood dried to her skin and sharp eyes made hazy and dangerous from the hunt, Sua thinks she is the most beautiful thing this world has created and tried to take back. It’s all the same, but Siyeon is still here.

“Wasn’t really hers, I think. She had borrowed time in her bloodstream. She wouldn’t have done the things we did if it was her own heart.” Siyeon’s voice is hoarse from disuse. She licks cracked lips and continues. “Dami looked sad. Real sad. I think I’ll be real sad too, once the moon sets.”

Everything burns, eventually. They’ve lost so much that Sua can’t bring herself to feel that old smoldering anger in her gut, the kind that explodes out of her in a rage of searing purple and melts a hundred lives at once. The kind of milestone that Yoohyeon never marked in her calendar.

“We’re the only ones left,” Sua realizes mildly. “You, me. Dami. Handong, maybe.”

“Maybe,” Siyeon agrees.

“Yoohyeon was the best of us.”

“Probably,” Siyeon cocks her head to the side, tongue absentmindedly running over the stained sharpness of her canines, “although, there’s not much competition, out of the five of us.”

Sua says nothing, because it’s true, and now there’s four, maybe, and neither she nor Siyeon are the best of who remains.

Siyeon still has the gaze of a predator when she casts a long look at Sua, but after everything, Sua finds nothing but calm there. They break eye contact at the same time, and Siyeon moves back to the door while Sua tosses a fresh change of clothes at her.

Siyeon catches it without looking. “Going to the lake to clean up,” she says needlessly, and then pauses and glances back. “...And happy birthday, Bora.” She crosses the threshold and is gone again.

Sua blinks after her for a moment, and then she scoffs so hard it turns into an uncontrollable laugh. She laughs until tears leak from the corners of her eyes, and she collapses flat on her back on an earthen floor that still feels like a lower bunk bed no matter how many furs she lays over it.

Everything burns. Time doesn’t matter, so things that have passed don’t matter. Still, Sua holds a pointer finger up over her face, and lets a flame flicker to the tip of her fingernail like it’s a candle that somehow survived to the end of a day circled in faint blue. The flame is a tame yellow. How easy it would be to make the walls around her vanish in a wave of violet. How easy it would be to dive in the clear lake and try to truly disappear, like they were supposed to do once they became liabilities instead of heroes.

She thinks of the softness of piercing eyes that has only ever been reserved for her. Of the sturdy arms that wrap around her when she can’t sleep because they’re the only ones that don’t mind the heat that boils under her skin. Of how, when the team was severed from each other, when all traces of them as individuals were erased, that somehow those eyes and those arms found her from across the world in less than a moon.

She could dive in. Could try to drown her flames away. But Siyeon would probably just find her again and pull her out.

Sua could burn, and she will, eventually. But for now she closes her eyes, puffs out a breath of air, and extinguishes the flame on her fingertip.

“Thanks for remembering,” she says softly up to an invisible bunk above her. “You really are the best of us, you know. Hope you’re having good dreams.”

She is answered with silence, not even the constant beating of a borrowed heart, so she figures Yoohyeon is finally sleeping peacefully.

Sua keeps her eyes shut until sunrise, when Siyeon returns, clean and lucid but somehow far more haggard than before. Beautiful, still. They stare at each other for a long, long moment of memory. Then Siyeon collapses to her knees beside Sua and Sua extends hands that have only known how to destroy and they hold each other and they cry, silently, so as to not disturb those who are resting now even as the dawn breaks.

Handong is ageless.

At least in the sense that she exists within all of time, and infinite possibility exists within her sight.

She has long stopped considering it a curse, but neither is it a blessing. Her sight is merely a weight on time-wearied shoulders.

Long, long ago, or perhaps far in the future, Handong sees a girl get her heart of gold stolen and crushed into stardust. In its place beats emptiness, as unyielding as the infinite from which it comes. The girl forgets how to live in anything but the absence of light. The girl forgets until she no longer lives. The girl becomes darkness, and the dark swallows the world in the madness that is forgotten sorrow.

Handong sees, and before the cycle of time is complete under her eyelashes, she knows she will save the world from the girl, will save the girl from her own heart.

She meets Yoohyeon. Fights alongside her. Rests their aching bones against each other. Learns to save their lives by looking forward.

One night Sua confronts her. She asks why it is that Handong looks at all of them so angrily, sometimes, looks at Siyeon’s claws bathed in gore and Sua’s hands drowning in fire and Dami’s feet swirling in shadows; looks with all-knowing eyes and hates what she sees.

Handong knows a million different timelines and a million ways this conversation goes. She still doesn’t know how to explain that it isn’t anger, at least not for Sua or Siyeon or Dami or Yoohyeon. She doesn’t know how to say that it’s the only way she can possibly look, because if she were to look around all over again she would see only herself staring back, accusing, a reminder that she must only look forward or else lose them to a future sealed finite.

“You can see the future. You know what’s coming. Is that why you look at us the way you do?”

“What’s passed has passed,” Handong says, and does not explain that this is the same as seeing what is to come. Somehow, Sua seems to get it. She has always been strong. At least enough to accept the weight of all of the lives she has taken. Enough to still let herself be weak to love. Out of everyone, out of gnarled hearts and gnashing fangs, Handong wishes it weren’t her.

But there isn’t another choice. Because long ago, or maybe far in the future, Handong sees a girl with a broken heart and chooses to rectify it.

In another timeline, the heart never remembers. There is no Handong, no Jiu, no phone call; Dami does not meet Gahyeon, and the world does not end in a beautiful rush of violet flames.

In this time, Sua meets Siyeon and calls her beautiful. In this future, Yoohyeon’s heart gives out before it can transform. In this past, Handong circles a pink reminder of a name onto a blue-inked calendar. In this present, it is all the same, and Handong tells Sua this with the stilted words a million lifetimes have granted her. A million times they will never be what needs to be heard.

“Siyeon runs. You burn. I apologize, and it is never enough.”

These three things are forever true. And a fourth: Yoohyeon always, always gives up her heart.

Handong never meets Minji. Not this time.

The world meets Jiu, and no power is enough to save it from her sorrow.

Handong chooses to save a heart, and destroys another; this, then, is what they’ve always done, in the taking of power that should not be theirs, and it is why they are the ones to whom time shows its merciless hands.

Dami lives in reflections. In a way, this makes her ageless, too. So long as shadows exist in parallel to light, she can slip into the in-between and break the laws of distance, which is just a scion of time.

What makes her different from Handong, who never had need to worry about the power that made her invaluable, or Sua, who lost the ability to care about it when its passing took Eunbin and Seungyeon and Yeeun and then everyone else who deserved more of it than they were allotted, is that Dami treats time like treasure. Each second is a gold piece waiting to be squandered or spent carefully.

And Dami is careful. Dami is calculating. And maybe that is what makes her the most deadly, even if the number of lives she has taken pale in comparison to the burnt and bloody trail left by Sua and Siyeon, and even Yoohyeon. Dami leaves no trail. She is untraceable. In a way, it absolves her of all guilt.

Not that Dami is capable of feeling it.

Yubin used to feel things like remorse and fear and maybe even love. Then one day she slipped into the cracks of her mother’s broken vanity mirror and when she re-emerged she looked at her reflection and saw nothing. She lost something, there, in that spider web of refracted light and shadow. This makes Dami the same as Jiu. And also the very opposite.

The others, even Jiu, cannot be as deadly because they feel before all else. Irrational decisions. Yoohyeon’s shining optimism and perpetual regret made her the most human even with alien blood pumping in her veins, Jiu seeks mindless destruction only out of grief, and Handong herself sealed the fate of the world when time gave her a vision of a broken heart and her empathy blinded her to the realities in which this remained a truth.

The only thing that informs Dami’s decisions are self-surviving thoughts. The others were convinced or coerced into joining the team, to become heroes, to work in the shadows of the world in order to ensure the light still shone the next day. Dami was already intimately familiar with both the dark and the light and knew there was nothing purely one or the other or perfectly in between. So she volunteered herself to the team, because with people like yet so unlike her with their hot tears and their icy anger, she could safely train her power and learn to survive as a reflection of herself. There is nothing but selfishness, in trying to save a world that does not want to be saved.

“When is Yoohyeon’s birthday?”

Handong asked once, in the middle of a crumbling defense against an airstrike. Dami had just finished pulling Yoohyeon’s unconscious body out from the rubble of a collapsed building she couldn’t stabilize in time. There was silence over their earpieces and it was more deafening than the next wave of bomber planes approaching over the dreary horizon. Through a sea of glass shards, Dami reached and saw Sua propel herself with flames through the air to meet the incoming strike head-on, saw the villagers shrink away from Siyeon in fear as she tried to guide them to safety, saw Handong gazing sadly into the distance but not in the direction of the planes. She returned in time and watched Yoohyeon’s crushed chest begin to repair itself. The one who should be dead. The one who should be human.

Yoohyeon always remembered, even if her body forced her to forget.

“Shit,” Sua barked out a laugh eventually, “who knows? Could be today.”

“Might as well be today,” Siyeon ground out between bloody teeth.

The planes continued forward, undeterred. The civilians flinched even further backwards.

“As any other day,” Handong said, softly, heavily.

It was probably Sua who started, but suddenly they were all serenading Yoohyeon’s limp body with an uncoordinated birthday song. Dami stared and stared at the puddle of strangely tinted blood around Yoohyeon’s head and in the reflection she found herself singing along. Even as it petered out into a roar of challenge from Sua and a howl of frustration from Siyeon, as Handong warned them of a soon-to-come surprise ground strike from the north, Dami stayed rooted in the shadows beside Yoohyeon.

She wouldn’t remember. And Dami didn’t feel. But somehow, years later, when she leaps into the reflection of a storefront window beside a payphone and a person, two things that should not exist anymore, she can do nothing but stand to the side yet again as they come and take Yoohyeon’s limp body away. She stands as the phone beeps and asks for more change, and finds herself hoping that if Yoohyeon in the end remembered the name she had forced herself to forget, maybe she also remembered how the team, including Dami, might have loved her back.

Dami stands even as she weeps for the first time in her life. The world shifts as she stands and as Minji, on the other end of the line, collapses.

But time, as it will for a while longer, keeps going. Dami eventually tells Siyeon, and squanders months of time’s blood money to find Handong. Minji tells Gahyeon she will come home soon, and then Jiu finds Sua.

“Yoohyeon is gone. But you knew that already,” Dami says when she finally finds Handong in a place with no light to reflect. “And you didn’t want to be found. But I knew that already.”

“What is it that you do not already know, then?” Handong asks, not grimly, not encouraging; neither is it really a question, as if she knows it is simply due time for this part of the future.

Dami finds it easy to ask like this, in the pitch black, like she is in the in-between and her body does not shake with the aged effort of existing.

“How do I stop Jiu from destroying the world?”

She cannot see, but she knows Handong is looking through her into what is past. Her hand twitches as if to reach toward Handong, to bring her back, like she can carry her away from becoming shadow too.

“You don’t.” A heavy pause; a clink of a single coin down a slot for more time. “Her sister Gahyeon does, today. Yesterday, tomorrow; the world still ends.”

Dami swallows, tongue dry with the effort of reaching past trillions of reflections in drops of rain. An irrational question clatters behind her teeth. Dami doesn’t feel it. Still she chooses to ask, and maybe she is just like them after all.

“Will you tell me something else I do not know?”

It could be the phantom touch of shadows as Dami begins to disappear, but for a moment, it feels like Handong reaches out in the dark and grasps her hand. The tremors cease for one bit of spare change in the time they have left.

“You know this already, too.”

But Dami asks anyway.

“Is there a time in which I can love her?”

And Handong grazes a thumb over Dami’s palm in one soft stroke, like the sun sweeping across the sky, like finally wiping a slate clean.

“There is never a time in which you do not.”

Yubin appears out of the rain behind Yoohyeon’s backyard grave and remains standing as she listens to Gahyeon speak. Far in the distance, a phone rings. It sounds like coins rattling into the bottom of an hourglass. Gahyeon looks at her with a wisdom even Handong does not possess, and takes her other hand.

And then it is easy to find Jiu. She is a reflection of all of them, after all.

Jiu rose to power through destruction. She wields an inferno of rage in her hands and a blinding grief in her chest, the kind that blurs the world into a canvas waiting to be painted in blood.

Perhaps this is why she does not kill Sua. She hunts the fire-wielder down as she has many others who were involved in the creation of heroes who never should have tried to save an unsalvageable world. Sua stands at the edge of a lake, uncharacteristically still, for what Jiu knows of her from blurred accounts of the disgraced heroes. The early morning is quiet in this removed pocket of nature. Jiu remembers once feeling this sort of tranquility like she is looking at a memory of a picture. A howl rings out from within the forest, full of mourning towards a sun that still rises, and Jiu lifts her hands to strike.

Sua bursts into flames. The orange of candlelight turns darker as she burns bigger and hotter until she threatens to touch the boughs of the tall trees just out of reach, to burn everything down behind her, to rend the tranquil morning into chaos — and then she leaps with a shadow of a yell and plunges into the lake.

A fine layer of steam plumes up from where she is submerged and blankets everything, settling over Jiu’s skin with the same stinging heat as blood splattered from a heart that still beats. She waits impatiently for the woman to surface. A minute passes, and then two; it may as well be a lifetime.

There is movement in the trees nearby. A beastly figure breaks through the scalding mist like it is nothing but early morning fog, and dives into the water that is surely boiling. There is splashing, and gasping, and silence, and then:

“...Handong was right.”

“Probably. Not like she could be wrong.”

“All we do… all we do is run and burn. Singnie… Singnie, we missed it. We missed Yoohyeon’s birthday. All she did was remember for us and we missed it and now she’s gone.”

“We never knew her birthday, though.”

“That’s why we missed it. That’s why we’ll always miss it.”

Jiu sees red at the mention of her name. The kind of crimson heat that stays steady even as she tears through bones and cities; the kind of blurred metronome within her that cries _destroy, destroy, destroy_ ; the kind of red that can never turn into the golden warmth that rises over two bodies intertwined, two hearts finally at home under a gently waking sun. She sees red and she moves to _take, take, take back_ — and then she hears the utter brokenness with which Sua sobs. It sounds like the howl from the forest. It sounds like the beating in her own chest.

The cloudiness clears, and Jiu sees Sua and Siyeon half-drowned and half-singed but still clinging desperately to each other, and in their pain she sees herself. She hasn’t recognized herself in a long, long time.

She steps out from the cover of the trees. Through the dissipating fog, three shadows almost look like one in the rippling reflection of the lake.

The end of the world continues.

Just as Yoohyeon wore hers on her sleeve, Jiu wears her broken heart as a crown of thorns. The world she destroys learns to respect and fear her like she is the descendant of an angry god. As she returns to the lake again and again, sometimes the blood of her enemies drips down her brow like perspiration, and sometimes the sallow moon shines down a halo and makes her lips almost look like they once curved in something other than cruelty. Sua and Siyeon learn to recognize her. It isn't trust, or even really love; it isn't respect for a queen or fear of a conqueror. Still Jiu returns, and still they remain. They tear whispers of the past out of each other’s mouths simply by existing as who they are and thus once were. They look into each other’s distant eyes and almost feel human. It is sharing the madness of loss; it is recognizing glimpses of their reflections in the millions of glass shards that rain down like scalding steam over a lake. It is almost something like healing, if only they knew how to do anything but destroy.

A week before Dami finds Handong, Jiu tells them, because they understand.

But they don’t.

They recognize her because they too have hands and souls forever stained. But it is only Jiu who wants to grip the world and wring it until it is inked in the same crimson. So that no one will need saving. So that this one thing will be fair. So that all hearts will be the same, and finally, _finally, and everything, Minji, I still_ — she can come home.

“Yoohyeon believed the world was still worth saving.”

 _I’m done, finally, Minji, I never stopped_ — “And that’s what took her from me.”

And just before Dami takes Gahyeon’s hand, just as her soldiers finally slash into the facility that once nurtured Yoohyeon’s unearthly powers, Jiu realizes they don’t understand because they still have a world worth saving in the tremulous hands that hold each other’s hearts. Siyeon and Sua get to surrender to time, to each other, in weariness instead of anger. Minji only ever found a world worth holding first in the protective grip around her little sister’s hand, and then in the gentle tracing of soft skin beneath eyes that somehow mirrored the stars as well as her own adoration.

So Jiu doesn’t have that option. The peace of the lake, no matter how illusory and suffocating in guilt, cannot be hers. Jiu isn’t Minji; Jiu has no home to come back to.

 _Destroy, take back, destroy, take back_ ; her shattered heart cries this rhythm as a timer counting down because there is no other way for it to possibly beat on.

And that is why she can only smile, lips curled as sad and cruel as a kiss goodbye, when the ones who were snatched up and used and then left to die by the world still come back one last time to try and save it. She faces them down across the laboratory full of alien relics and supernatural experiments, the ones that destroyed lives to save them, the ones that once took everything from Jiu and will now take its salvation.

Everything is alit in pulsating bursts of unearthly energy. An irregular heartbeat. An irrational decision. The pulses, like flickering candlelight, make the room feel checkered. Jiu stands regal with a crown of blood ringing her forehead. Sua and Siyeon stand; a claw on one side, a flame on the other, and between them simple human hands held together by the weathering of fight and the scarring of surrender. They look across the room at each other and see not a red queen, nor a duo of white knights. They look and see a pawn of time mirrored endlessly back at them, and maybe now they see what Handong sees. How easy it is to mistake love for anger, fairness for choice, salvation for destruction.

Jiu has no hand to hold and call her human. In her palms instead she wields the ability to harness the energy around them. To control and contain the heartbeat until it can do nothing but shatter. It isn’t power that she wields, though; this, at the end of the world, is nothing but empty hands sweeping the final, tired stroke onto the canvas. It all ends now, in one final, volatile explosion of heartbreak.

Sua suddenly finds one hand devoid of warmth, like a shiver of shadow has snuffed out her flame. But her fire, the color of dawn, still remains in her palm.

Siyeon lets go of Sua’s hand. A single ripple of refracted light away, Gahyeon takes Dami’s.

“Siyeon,” Sua starts, voice small with pain that was and is and will be, and there is nothing more she can end with than: “Stay with me.”

A million timelines are the same. A heart is saved; a heart is broken. Handong apologizes again, and it is not enough.

Siyeon runs.

She doesn’t take the time to transform, simply sprinting across the room towards Jiu with eyes dull from tears instead of sharp with animal instinct. Jiu sees her reflection rushing towards her and does not hesitate to channel the energy forward. She hates what she sees; anger, love; past, future; Siyeon is all too human.

And so is Gahyeon.

Dami stumbles halfway between the opposing sides and lands with her hands and feet drowning in shadow. Gahyeon sees the person her sister has become and she sees an empty gravestone in the mud and she feels a single drop of rain caress her cheek as she leaps toward the gathering of light. Irrational decisions. Questions that are already answered. A coin drops and buys time for a single, off-kilter heartbeat.

“Minji!”

Gahyeon intercepts Siyeon with a desperate tackle. There is a horrifyingly white flash of light as Jiu fails to see her sister in that brief heartbeat, in the red that drips from the crown of her head and blurs her vision.

Like the last grains of sand slowly sliding through the neck of an hourglass, like the beginnings of a rainshower onto an unmarked grave, time slows in its last vestiges as Gahyeon’s body is seized with light.

When Jiu can see again, her gaze falls halfway between herself and Sua, opposite to where Dami flickers on the floor, to where Gahyeon has risen unsteadily on muddy knees.

“Minji,” her little sister whispers, face soft in a youth Jiu has long forgotten, “you said you would come home soon.”

Her eyes are a blazing white. A tear trails down her cheek, and it is an unnatural gold so familiar that it fractures the crimson that covers Jiu’s eyes. And she sees. She sees herself turning away from Gahyeon’s innocent smile and she sees herself kiss Yoohyeon’s tear-stained cheek goodbye and she sees the only people that were once her world fall to her feet, lifeless, there but just out of reach.

She sees the world she has truly destroyed.

For one moment she is Minji. Her heart shatters, and she collapses with them.

Yet in this moment, she is Jiu, and there is nothing left for her to take but vengeance. She moves towards Gahyeon but cannot allow herself to look back. So she steps forward, to where the wrong heart remains. She kicks a fracture of her reflection onto its back so she can make right this one thing. And, looking back up at her in recognition, for the first time, Siyeon doesn’t feel the urge to run.

Sua has only ever known how to destroy. Bora, all too human, cannot move fast enough.

Time grants Siyeon just enough of itself for her to look up across the room, eyes soft with all the love that was and is and will be. And then Jiu strikes.

And maybe now Bora understands.

Because she screams in anguish as if it is her own heart that has been ripped out.

Far away, looking out to the horizon and finally seeing nothing but the sunset on another day, Handong whispers a final apology into the light.

It is never enough.

Because Siyeon ran. And now, Bora burns.

If Yoohyeon had looked at her calendar past the day Handong wrote Minji’s name in pink with a reminder to call, she would have seen this day, as any other, inked out in purple pen.

Yubin’s body trembles with the exertion of a year and a lifetime, and she drags herself closer to the burning light to keep out of the shadows. But to do so is to survive all the distance she has traveled. To do so is to fight time itself. And to attempt that, to find what she has lost, is irrational when they have no time in the world left to spare.

Still she reaches, one last time. She sees a beautiful sunset, soft like the last flickers of a single bent candle, through the tears that line Handong’s lashes.

Yubin appears beside her, a brief reflection in broken light, and finally loses all of her to the in-between. Handong blinks her tears away, and Dami is gone.

In the wall of burning anguish that soon grows into a forest of flames, their reflections shimmer.

Jiu looks on in triumph and agony as the flames surround her. They wash the blood from her hands and head in cool relief, and when she looks for her reflection, she sees her heart being given back to her golden and whole. She tilts her head up the slightest bit, lips curved kind and stained with tears, and it is almost as if she is finally coming home.

And then the only one that remains at the end of the world is Bora.

She screams, and she burns, and that is all that is left to do; to burn and burn until finally she feels the heat sear her own skin, until finally she can force the scalding pain in her blood to evaporate into a tranquil morning mist over the lake. She burns a beautiful, terrible wave of violet fire that blankets the world like a human tucking their lover into their embrace. And when finally she too burns, when all of the hearts around the world have turned to ash, she feels familiar arms pull her back in so they can fade together into a sleep that is dreamless and peaceful and wonderful.

And now; and everything.

There is nothing to be saved.

There is no love. No brokenness.

Only everything that has been, and is, and will be; and now an hourglass turned fresh.

In time, stardust returns from emptiness to coalesce into something unyielding.

Out of the infinite, a heart of gold begins to beat once more.

**Author's Note:**

> ...yes. I have many other ideas and written snippets for Dreamcatcher-inspired characters as superheroes/villains, and they are much more lighthearted — let me know if I should post some, or if you hated this; regardless, I beg you to sign my #letSuADeathGrowl petition. we've gotten Handong solo, so this is next on the bulletin board :p


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